Douglas Carswell's Blog

Bad ideas come from the top

What do inner city tower blocks, the thematic classroom curriculum, Britain’s membership of the ERM and the reckless credit boom all have in common?   They were, in their different ways, each pretty disastrous. Public policy mistakes that inflicted a great deal of harm.  

Yet more than that, each one was an innovation foisted on the country by an elite, who often earned their living by promoting their particular fad – and who persisted with their idea long after the ruinous effect of their wrong-headedness had become evident.   

Those who, back in the 1960s, decided it was time to start housing council tenants in concrete towers did, I’m sure, have good intentions.  In their technocratic, we-know-what’s-best way, they felt they were offering people a better future.  So too, did those educationalist “experts” who made everyone else embraced so-called progressive education. 

Those who argued that we should peg our currency to that of Germany in the 1990s, and who claimed we could abolish boom and bust in the noughties with endlessly cheap credit, were once actually called wise men. 

Although we are a representative democracy, public policy all too often turns out not to be formulated in response to popular demand. Rather it is formulated by an elite in response to what they take to be our needs. From European integration to restorative justice, where are the crowds demanding half the faddish ideas that our elite impose on us? 

Without effective democratic accountability, we cannot see quickly or clearly when Plato’s latter-day guardians in the local town hall, Whitehall or Brussels, turn out to be clowns.

Improving the way we are governed is not simply a case of shuffling ministers about in SW1. It is not even necessarily a case of adopting this or that new idea.  Instead, it means enabling public policy to be more quickly adjusted when things go wrong.   

Making those who run your local police, school or council more directly democratically accountable helps ensure that bad ideas are quickly discarded – and good new ideas are replicated. 

Direct democracy allows us to replace the stasis of the elite with the dot com dynamism of the crowd.

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